What to do when api returns html or json for different errors

Question

Using python requests to talk to the github api.

response = requests.post('https://api.github.com/orgs/orgname/repos', auth, data)

If the request returns a 405 error I get HTML in the response.text

<html>
<head><title>405 Not Allowed</title></head>
<body bgcolor="white">
<center><h1>405 Not Allowed</h1></center>
</body>
</html>

If the request returns a 422 error I get JSON in the response.text

{"message":"Validation Failed","errors":        [{"resource":"Repository","code":"custom","field":"name","message":"name already exists on this account"}],"documentation_url":"https://developer.github.com/v3/repos/#create"}

Can I force the API to only return JSON?

If not, can I find out what type the response content will be?

To find what kind of response the content will be in you could check the http response code! — coder
– coder, Commented Sep 30, 2016 at 15:22
Also as I read here: developer.github.com/v3/#schema all data is sent and received as JSON, so in your case it may be an authentication issue - or in other words you are trying to retrieve not-allowed content and that is maybe why the server doesn't send a response back, instead prints a not allowed message in HTML ... — coder
– coder, Commented Sep 30, 2016 at 15:29
You can go with try: json.loads() and then except with html. — zipa
– zipa, Commented Sep 30, 2016 at 16:05

Simon Black · Accepted Answer · 2016-09-30 16:08:37Z

1

In response to:

If not, can I find out what type the response content will be?

If you want to know why github returns html rather than JSON for the API call, I can not answer that; however, to the answer to the above asked question, you can look at the "content" header of the http response.

response = requests.post('https://api.github.com/orgs/orgname/repos', auth, data)
if "application/json" in response.headers['content-type']:
    print response.json()

In response to:

Can I force the API to only return JSON? you could try forcing the "Accept header within the request; however, this is down to GitHub server if it wants to serve json in the response

response = requests.post('https://api.github.com/orgs/omnifone/repos', auth=auth, data=data, headers={"Accept": "application/json"})

answered Sep 30, 2016 at 16:08

Simon Black

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